This Is Why I Hate Paywalls

Existence begins with a sigh, a goat, and a slide down a birth canal. I want the full meaning of this sentence to disassemble itself in a centrifuge. What can we do to make this moment incandescent? This is where the hammer becomes a couplet. Stupefaction by Wi-Fi. I like to think of it as a kitchen appliance that straddles conventional boundaries and eludes definition. I enjoy every opportunity I get to wield a wrench. But sometimes I feel more like Malta. The call of an interior postulation puts my focus on hold, and I turn to the window for a ride across the Rubicon. I’ve made up my mind to go warm and temperate into the tropical regions of my southern hemisphere. Experience begins with a single inhalation. And ends with a fantasy. My fingers curled around an orange. My head wrapped around a novel perspective. How do you draw the light? How do you draw space? Just space. Nothing in it. No planets. No stars. No bus depots. No diners or donors or dinosaurs. Space. And many exciting minutes later Sandra Bullock. Reaching the sandy shore. And standing up. But that’s not space. That’s moo. Nothingness. Absence. Non-being. How do you draw that? What pencil do you use? What brush? What anarchy? What piano sonata? This is just silly. All the space is between the words. Not in the words. The slide in the park was put together with syllables. And a crescent wrench.

How does one manage to put so many words together without burdening them with the world’s tedium? I want to see the energy of life on paper. I want to see syllables and morphemes click as they collect the residue of combusting metaphors. Poetry is an incendiary problem with an explosive solution. Every now and then one gets a nice clean shot on the gun range. We live in an era nebulous as a rice ball. There are no parameters or parachutes. Capitalism is kaput. Competition has been replaced by authoritarian updates, unfulfilling fulfillment centers and sternly timed bathroom visits. Do you remember what it was like to feel your life unfold in candlelight and confession with the same quality of attention as a reader feels the articulations of a book tease the mind into thought? Writing gives us the opportunity to pour the northern lights over a crust of definition, and walk away grinning like Minnesota Fats after clearing the table with a single shot. It doesn’t always work out that way. It usually goes sideways. It’s why I get a kick out of punctuation. Is there still a place for poetry under the tutelage of techno-fascism? Sublime dead authors enlighten no one in library mausoleums. Books should be as wide-spread and available as water. You can use my swimming pool until I'm insoluble, & lost in butterflies.

Life is so much better when things are within reach. This is why I hate paywalls. Everything is siloed. Privatized. Automated. Society has been atomized into YouTube shorts. Who invented the zipper? I’ll bet there’s a video on YouTube to provide that information. Shared reflections can be erratic, depending on the host. Feelings aren’t always aluminum. And anything orthogonal can be abandoned for something folded and linen. Can you show me how you were born? I’ve forgotten much of it. Things continue to lie dormant within me. Trees. Hygrometers. Skies boiling with altocumulus. In the prominence of tidepools there are ample definitions for the weave of Michaux’s sumac. I want to see it do something extraordinary. Pour polar oil on a plaster mosquito. Sometimes I feel compelled to pin a question mark on a crab. There’s a melee every moment that staggers in the timeless presence of a Helsinki coconut. Here we have a group of carpenters swarming around a sonnet. I’m not always so openly scientific. Which is to say the carpenters are real. But the sonnet is not. The sonnet has been transformed into a bloodmobile.

Yesterday I bought a sound. A gown of sound. I’m a man of elder years and chrome elephants eavesdropping on marathons of pain. I consider clothing to be sparkles of perambulation on paper, parables of lavender and gray, like the sunsets of France. The sleeves of evening may be deployed in the libraries of the soul. These are the ghosts of pool sticks, the very things of which the world is made, including all the fractured ideals following a bloody revolution. Subtleties of this sonority shake the inhibitions from my horn. It’s a funny feeling. But I’ll get used to it. This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Mars. I crawled out of the world early in the game, when two tickets to a concert of frogs cost two bucks and a papal dispensation. I just come here for naps now, and a little vanishing point perspective. I keep looking at it with the old perspectives. And then it occurred to me, isn’t the need to alter one’s perceptions the sine qua non of poetry? The Norse gods are deep in their mead, howling sagas at sawdust dolls. That was the original sound. Not the new sound. The new sound is from outer space, catching fire in a Belgian dictionary.